


Gunning out of this place in a bullet's embrace (gravity don't mean that much to me)

by Trojie



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Canonical Character Death, Episode: s05e04 The End, M/M, Supernatural AU: Croatoan/End'verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-01
Updated: 2013-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-23 04:41:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/618185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trojie/pseuds/Trojie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three words shouldn't be enough to change the world. But <i>Sammy said yes</i>. (Castiel thinks he's fallen as far as he can, but there's always further to go when you're following Dean Winchester down.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gunning out of this place in a bullet's embrace (gravity don't mean that much to me)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from 'Bulletproof Heart' by My Chemical Romance. Written for my hurt-comfort bingo prompt 'falling'. 
> 
> Huge thanks to my anonymous beta, who pulled me up on the glaring consistency errors which are par for the course when you write something at 2am on New Year's Day <3

_2009_

Sam leaves Bobby's house one morning, in the middle of a research jag that's seen all of Bobby's coffee and most of his bourbon drunk. For an hour, they think maybe he went off to find them some kind of breakfast, but only for an hour. After that, they all harbour a terrible instinct about what's happened, where Sam's gone, but it's as if they can make it be untrue as long as they don't say it. They search for him. Castiel rides in the back seat of the Impala. Bobby follows them in his truck. Crowley does not appear - rats always escape from sinking ships, Castiel thinks bitterly but doesn't say out loud. They keep Sam's place open in their lives and routines as if he's only around the corner, just doing a job and ready to come back into the fold any moment now.

It's Dean that brings the pretty illusion down, of course. Three words shouldn't be enough to change the world. But they are. 

He speared off on his own, on a hunch he said, leaving Castiel with Bobby and arranging to meet them two days later at a crossroads outside Sioux Falls. He's leaning against the dusty flank of the Impala when they arrive, and one look at his face tells Castiel the truth. This isn't the Dean he's grown close to. This is the Dean he pulled from Hell.

'Sammy said yes,' says Dean. Three words, to turn everything upside down.

'And?' Bobby prompts.

Castiel says nothing. There's no 'and'. There's nothing more to say. This is the end.

***

Except it isn't. It's worse.

The Croatoan virus gets dumped into a water treatment plant in California a week later, and Hell on Earth opens for business, led by a tall, beautiful man with long hair and sad eyes and a boy's mischievous grin.

Castiel catches Dean out in Bobby's car yard, toying with his pearly-handled Colt the night after they kill their first group of infected, the night they first see Lucifer on the grainy televisions in a storefront. 

'It's prom night,' Dean says, half to himself. 'And I'm on the shelf.' 

Castiel ignores the metaphor and takes the gun away. Dean lets him, which might be the most worrying part.

'We went to prom once,' Dean says, fishing a bottle of beer out of the shadows to replace his weapon, and Castiel can't take everything away from him so he lets that one lie. 'Sam and me. Well. Crashed a prom. It was his senior year. We sat outside with a fifth of whiskey, laughing at all the assholes in ruffled shirts.'

'I don't think this is that kind of prom,' says Castiel, somewhat at a loss.

'Good,' says Dean, draining the last of his beer. 'It sucked.'

Dean kisses him at midnight and Castiel suspects that it means something particular to him. He very gently cups Castiel's jawline in his hands and presses their mouths together, his lips parted only a breath's width. Castiel catches him by his elbows and it's a long moment before they break the embrace. 

'We should go inside,' says Castiel, his voice coming out deeper and more startled than he means it to.

'Yeah,' says Dean, swallowing. 'I should get you back before your curfew.'

Dean slinks back out of Bobby's house again in the early hours of the morning, as if he thinks Castiel doesn't notice his movements - as if he thinks Castiel can sleep. For a terrible moment, Castiel feels an overwhelming sense of history repeating itself. But if Dean wants to say yes, if he wants to be with his brother, if he wants this to be _over_ … right now, Castiel can't blame him. 

Dean is at the breakfast table the next morning. Nothing is over.

***

Bobby dies a hero, sitting in his chair in a makeshift vantage point on an old flatbed pickup, holding off Croatoan sufferers in the centre of Sioux Falls long enough for Dean and Castiel to smuggle a daycare's worth of children out and away from their own rabid parents. They find him afterwards, hauled out of his chair but surrounded by corpses. There are slashes and bite marks up and down his arms and neck.

He'd kicked off the shoe on his good, working foot, to enable him to wedge a toe into the trigger of his twelve-gauge shotgun. To ensure that no-one infected leaves the scene.

Dean burns him to ash there on the road, with Castiel hacking the children's wooden play equipment to pieces to feed the fire over the course of a long, moonless night. The flames of Bobby's pyre keep the sick away until they run out of fuel for it, and then they get back into the car. 

There is a sinking familiarity to watching Dean make decisions, Castiel realises. This isn't a widening gyre they're turning in any more, searching and watching and waiting for an opportunity; this is the downward spiral. No more planning. They're running. 

They sleep bundled up on opposite sides of the Impala's front seat, when they do sleep (Castiel's finding it harder to resist his vessel's need for human things like this, slipping in through the cracks in his grace), and when Castiel wakes, more often than not they've shifted until they're bundled up together. He'll blink in the dawning light and find that Dean is cupped around him. Winter's coming down, and they're both cold, and this is as good a solution, maybe, as any. 

Castiel knows he wants to warm Dean in more ways than one, but he isn't prepared to be the one to put the match to this pyre they're building for themselves.

***

Ironically it's a Sunday, the day the Earth is abandoned by Heaven. Castiel barely has any of what Dean would call 'angel mojo' left by this point - what he described as 'drained batteries' after Van Nuys never exactly recharged. It's more like a dry riverbed now, if anyone were to ask him for an analogy. 

The departure of the garrison is a momentary storm along that old waterway. They're walking, cautiously and quietly as they know how, along a ruined street (it's amazing how fast civilisation tarnishes without upkeep) when Castiel stumbles, shocked like lightning's touched him.

Dean grabs him by the elbow before he can trip, but his gasp echoes along the concrete tunnel the street makes, and before they know it, they're running again. They don't get the supplies they were hoping for. It means another hungry night, and more importantly, a need to be more sparing with their ammunition until they can restock.

'The fuck was that, Cas?' Dean demands when they're back in the Impala. 

'The garrison,' Castiel says, biting it out because it hurts, all his brothers and sisters cut away from him so suddenly. 'They've gone. They've left us.'

'The angels? All of them?' Dean glances at Castiel, and he must not like what he sees because his jaw clenches when he turns back to the road ahead. 

'Yes.'

'But you're still here.' Castiel knows Dean well enough to hear the questions riding underneath the statement of fact. 

And all he has to give him is the most basic of truths. 'Yes. I'm not an angel any more.'

***

They don't drive that far before eventually they run aground in an abandoned junkyard. It has fences. Dean is aching and empty inside, Castiel can feel it like a hollowness in his own breast, alongside the sadness he carries in his own right. They're twins, or mirrors, in grief. And the fences won't help, but they're better than nothing, they're at least a line drawn in the sand. 

In here, us. Out there, them. Team Free Will, or what's left of it. 

They get jumped by another group of sufferers before they can lock themselves in. Castiel's coat gets ripped - Dean takes a blow to his shoulder that he pretends isn't still hurting three hours later, but neither of them gets infected. Castiel is getting better with the pump-action shotgun. Dean is getting better at finding the balance between treating Castiel like a helpless civilian in a firefight, and forgetting and treating him like Sam.

They build another fire. This one is clean wood, no gasoline or salt, but Castiel would swear the stink of Bobby's pyre has followed them. They've barely spoken since their failed supply run, except for signpost reading or battlefield warnings. They have always been attuned when it mattered. Words always fail them, trip them up in unnecessary nuances, so they've been avoiding them. But now that they are out of the Impala, no longer running, the silence is starting to stretch thin.

Dean breaks it. 'So, you're human now, right?' he asks, poking at the embers.

It's a strange thing to say, out of nowhere, but it's a tactical question of sorts. Nothing more. Castiel relaxes and only then realises he was tense.

'To all intents and purposes,' he says. 'I'm cut off from Heaven. I'm more trapped in this vessel than possessing it, you might say.' The words spill out as if he's been storing them up. There is so much he wants Dean to understand, as if that will help. As if he can _advise_ Dean out of his parallel plummet. Dean is human. Dean can rise again, doesn't have wings to break, like Castiel did.

'So the virus can get you too?' Dean says, taking a drink. He unearthed a half-full bottle of Jack Daniels in the Impala's trunk earlier, and Castiel still wonders if he should say something but Dean hasn't done much more than pull at it slowly and hold it like it comforts him. 

'I don't know. Probably.'

Dean grunts, and then offers the bottle across the space between them. It's too far, just, for Castiel to reach, so he shuffles closer. 

The liquor burns bright in Castiel's throat when he swallows, leaves numbness in its wake. He coughs. Dean smiles, briefly. 

By the time the fire is a grey-red smoulder, the distance between Dean and Castiel is less than it ever has been even in the Impala's front seat. The firelight flickers in the gloss of Dean's eyes, the wet curve of his lower lip, when he looks at Castiel. 

'I never really thought he'd do it,' Dean confesses. 'He must have had some fucking stupid plan, I guess. He wouldn't have just given in, right?' he asks, turning away and swallowing the last of his bourbon down. 

Castiel can't answer that. 

'I knew he was thinking of doing something.' Dean says, and it's clearly like choking on broken glass for him to admit it. 'I should have asked,' he mutters. 'I should have fucking beaten his ass 'til he told me. He shouldn't have had to do that alone.'

'Hey,' says Castiel awkwardly, patting at Dean's shoulder, trying to get him to turn around, trying to see his face. 'Neither should you,' he says, when Dean turns into his hold at last - no space to go anywhere else. 

'I didn't,' says Dean into his shoulder. 'Remember? I said no. I said no 'til my throat shredded, man.'

'You weren't saying 'no' on prom night,' Castiel points out, possibly because of the alcohol. He shouldn't say it. He shouldn't know it.

Dean snorts. 'I was too late. Story of my life, Cas. By the time I get my head out of my own ass, everyone's got over me.' He's lax in Castiel's arms, an accidental sort of hug, and he's boneless and not as drunk as he wants to be and he's just … accepting. He's been thrown down and for the first time he isn't bouncing back. 

'Not me,' Castiel says like a prayer. 'Never me.'

His Father art not in Heaven, hallowed name or not. His Kingdom never arrived, His will's been thwarted everywhere that matters. Castiel's belly rumbles with a lack of daily bread, and he looks down on Dean Winchester, the Michael-sword, the Righteous Man, and knows with utter clarity that he is mortal now and that he is about to sin. 

'Forgive me,' he whispers, and kisses Dean, because this might be his last chance. 

Dean reaches up and takes hold like he thinks it might be, too. They sin comprehensively, insofar as Castiel is any judge. 

***

The next time they get word of Lucifer, he's in Milwaukee, so that's where they go. They criss-cross the country, always a step behind, until the Croats have become numerous enough to prevent easy travel. 

(It takes Castiel a very long time to get used to thinking of them as 'Croats', not as sick people. But he does. Apparently there is always a further distance to drop. Apparently the empathy he thought was a foundation was only a ledge, crumbling under his fingers this whole time. But it makes him stronger, lets him pull the trigger faster. 

Castiel sees now why Uriel always called mankind 'monkeys'.) 

Dean pulls them back to that abandoned junkyard, intent on making it some kind of base of operations, but it's full of frightened people who saw the fences and dug in, and Dean doesn't have the heart to throw them out. He can't just sit still though, either. By the time Croats show up in the village over the way, he's been drilling his civilians with any weapons they'd managed to drag in with them, and then they're not civilians anymore, not really. 

Dean has to shoot two of them, after their first 'mission'. He does it so quick, so clean. Castiel admires it, somewhere in the shivering mess of his head. 

'They were infected,' Dean growls into the faces of the remainder when they shriek and panic. 'You wanna have a committee meeting about it? You wanna tell them, maybe? You want them to know their friends are plotting to kill them? Fuck you. Do it quick, do it clean. They were your friends - you want them to suffer?'

'We should stop,' says Castiel later on, when the night is starting to fall. They are still living out of the Impala, the two of them, even though they should probably mingle more, try to build actual relationships out of this mess of pseudomilitary desperation Dean is pulling together. 'We're done, Dean. These are the end-times. No-one expects -'

'I'm not leaving him out there,' says Dean, sharpening Ruby's knife ritualistically. 'He's my responsibility.'

No points for guessing who 'he' is.

'And after that?' Castiel asks. 

Dean looks up at him. 'After that, I hope I still have a bullet left,' he says. 'Cos I'm gonna need it.' 

***

A Croat breaks Castiel's arm two weeks after they move the whole outfit to an old military base called Camp Chitaqua. It's not far out of a hot zone but it used to be used for basic training, woodcraft and outdoor exercises, that kind of thing, so it has cabins and a big camp kitchen and is fenced as strongly as anything ever is any more. There's even a minefield still somewhat live on the far western perimeter. 

Castiel sustains a greenstick fracture of his left ulna in a skirmish outside their own gates. They do push the Croats out far enough to give them a safe buffer zone, but Castiel limps back into the compound cradling his arm as a price. The Prophet Chuck, who Dean picked up accidentally on a supply run and who has turned into their informal quartermaster, doles him out some pain medication. 

It dulls Castiel's pain. It dulls _everything_. He doesn't know what that first dose was, exactly, but he would kill to know. He tries everything else he can find once it wears off, not because his arm is so sore but because that blessed grey fog was the kindest thing he's ever felt. 

If Dean hadn't found him and stuck his fingers down Castiel's throat, they tell him he could have died. He is very careful about dosages after that, even though some people would not believe him. He takes enough to grey the pain away. He takes enough to be happy. 

He finds other human distractions. Women. Gardening - edible crops, medicinal crops, if that's what you want to call them. It gives him time in the sun, communion with living things instead of dying ones. But mostly he takes prescription medicaments that were not prescribed to him, and women, because there is a satisfaction in recreational physical contact and he is not the only person seeking mindless forgetting, and helping people is still, somehow, in his nature.

Sometimes, he thinks he has managed to find in his cocktail of drugs and sex a shadow of the oversensitive awareness of the world he had as an angel. But then Dean will do something as ordinary as grab him by the shoulder, and that last vestige of Castiel's grace will remember its one great task, and nothing ever compares. 

***

As long as Dean's alive, he'll chase Lucifer, because to him, it's chasing Sam and it's chasing Sam's killer, and there's no part of Dean that won't do those things. They are brothers. But if brothers really did what they wanted, what was best for them, then Michael would have fallen with Lucifer, all those centuries ago, and none of this would have had to happen.

The truth is, Castiel should have rained fire down on the Winchesters when they were just sinning humans he barely knew. Or he should have let Uriel have his way. 

And Dean and Sam should have gone down in a hail of bullets years before that, together, bleeding each other's blood and breathing each other's air. Sam should have been stabbed in the back and died in a mud puddle and been burned. Dean should have been electrocuted and died in a hospital, should have said his _yes_ to a reaper like all good little soldiers do in their time. 

These are all things that could have saved the world.

At the very least, if Sam was going to be taken, then Dean should have been too. _Michael should have fallen with Lucifer._ Because there is no one without the other. Because that's the point, that's the deal, that's the story, and there was never any getting away from it.

But now Lucifer rides Sam like a nightmare, and Michael is gone with the rest of them, and Dean is a hollow space inside his own meat suit. Castiel has the taste of ashes in his mouth instead of holy fire when he kisses Dean, when they make it back to Camp Chitaqua after yet another raid, without most of the people they set out with. 

He doesn't care who sees this. He never cares. This isn't for forgetting. This isn't solace.

'Cas -'

'Shhh,' says Castiel, pulling him closer. Pulling him inside his hut.

Dean tastes of the kind of nothing you get when you have barely any food to fill you with, of cordite and brass where he's been reloading and reloading and reloading and didn't have enough hands. Castiel can still taste inside his own mouth the marijuana he smoked this morning and the skin of the last girl he talked into his bed, and he wonders if Dean tastes them too, and if he cares. 

Dean won't take drugs from him, and he finds his own female companionship when he wants it, or when they come to him because they want it. What he needs from Castiel (what Castiel needs from him) is what they've always shared, and it's wordless and breathless and not much more than touch, just pushed together like all they have is inches of bench seat instead of the relative spaciousness of Castiel's bed, still mostly clothed as if it's sticky leather beneath them instead of sheets. 

Dean's pearl-handled Colt, battered now, most of the engraving scratched, but still as clean and working as perfectly as ever, is hitched into his waistband. Castiel takes it away, like always.

'Still one bullet left,' Dean says against Castiel's throat. 'Kept count.' 

'Too bad,' says Castiel, pulling him up to kiss him properly. 'You'd need two. Guess today's not the day.'

'Not taking you down with me,' Dean mutters even as his hands find Castiel's hips. 

Castiel could almost laugh, because oh, it's far too late for that. 'Where else am I going to go?' he asks instead.

***

_2014_

The Dean of the past is almost a gentle creature, compared to the Dean of now. Even through the glorious, floating haze of Castiel's coping methods, seeing him brings back every memory; every reason, all the little stumbles they both took.

He looks at Castiel and is … not disgusted, but disappointed. It seems he thought that Castiel's angelic grace would last forever, even through all the things they did together, all the sins, all the wrongs. He clearly has never understood just how easy it can be for an angel to fall.

The Dean of now knows all too well, and he still blames himself. Looking between them now, the past and the present, Castiel remembers how, and why, and God help him, but he would do it all again. Different, yes, but only in the details.

Dean, the one who hasn't fallen down and broken his soul again and again on the stones of his own good intentions, watches his older, _fallen_ , self, and Castiel can tell he doesn't see how easy it is going to be for him to do the same.


End file.
